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An App to Boil Down Online User Reviews

Posted by timothy on from the please-phrase-your-review-as-free-verse dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Is this a glimpse at the future of the Semantic Web? A new startup named Pluribo has developed a technology that can auto-summarize user reviews on the internet. It is a Firefox extension that can take a webpage filled with reviews and condense it down into a couple of sentences. Currently, it just works with Amazon electronics, but the potential seems incredible. Ars Technica took an in-depth look."

6 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. One problem by Rob+Kaper · · Score: 4, Informative

    The application seems to assume that the best summary is the one with the most correlation to the other posts, in other words: the most common viewpoint. While that may work fine for user reviews, in most cases the viewpoint of the masses is usually not the best.

  2. I approved it. by jez9999 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I approvied the Pluribo extension for being pushed to public. All I can say is that it gets most of its data from the Pluribo server, and does very little client-cide besides display the data. At the moment it is *extremely* limited, literally to a handful of products. Apparently their system doesn't do the scanning of comments automatically otherwise it would work for everything, whereas it actually has to query the Pluribo server to get results.

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
  3. Mac OS X Summary Service by Penguin+Follower · · Score: 3, Informative

    Built into Mac OS X is a Summarize Service (click on the application's menu and point to "Services" and choose Summarize) that is pretty cool. Unfortunately, Firefox was never coded to work with that OS X native service, so I had to copy and paste the text of that Ars Technica article into Text Edit and then use that service. But here is the resulting summary (I had to do as short a summary as possible):

    While summarizing other types of non-review content isn't on the company's roadmap for now, Chakrabarti said the company is listening to user feedback. He also admitted that, "in many ways, summarizing facts is actually a lot easier than summarizing opinions." Pluribo's current focus on user-generated reviews and opinions is certainly a useful one, but I can see all kinds of other consumer applications for things like long Wikipedia entries and even articles like the one you're reading.

  4. This is not the Semantic Web by redfood · · Score: 2, Informative

    The idea behind the Semantic Web is that content providers tag content with semantic information to allow the creation of an ontology so that programs can easily use the for reasoning. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) The is an example of text summarization which is a classic natural language processing (NLP) task.

  5. Re:How about a comment synopsis generator by xant · · Score: 4, Informative

    Man, you guys really don't know about Alterslash yet?

    --
    It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
  6. Several summarizer tools already there by ruphus13 · · Score: 3, Informative

    that do essentially the same thing with text summary (similar to Mac OS X's summarizer). There's an Open Source project that does this too called Summarizer - http://sourceforge.net/projects/summarizer